The Bears haven’t updated their depth chart following Justin Fields’ first career start. Andy Dalton is still QB1, Fields is QB2 and Nick Foles is still QB3. But that doesn’t mean Dalton will be starting when the Bears host the Lions in Week 4. That still depends on how Dalton is feeling as he recovers from a knee injury he sustained in Week 2.
“Starter will be sorted out once we have a clearer picture moving forward here,” Matt Nagy said. “We’ll know more and we’ll clear that up.”
While most players say they’re eager to get back on the field after an awful performance, with Fields it’s a little more complicated. Do you throw him back out there and risk another bad game? Do you get him another start ASAP to try and erase the Browns game as quickly as possible?
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From his perspective, Nagy is not concerned about possibly sitting Fields after his tough debut.
“No, because the career he’s about to have and where he’s gonna be, I don’t worry about that,” Nagy said. “He understands, when he’s a part of those conversations and he hears where things are and all of that, I think for him, he gets to see like, ‘Hey when you play against a defense of that nature, with those athletic guys that are on the edge and the scheme that they have and who they are — it’s a good football team… Justin will learn from this.
“There’s so many little things in that game that happened that even though big picture, all of the ugly stats and the bad loss— all that said, the beautiful part of all of that is that… there’s about probably four or five things in there that from the quarterback perspective he can learn from. And they’re little things that maybe he hasn’t gone through before, even in preseason. So he’s taking those and he’s stacking those up and he’s gonna use those so that the next time, he can get better. And so it’s unfortunate to lose like that. It’s hard. You’d rather win and go through those, but he’s always growing.”
If it is Fields starting Week 4, Nagy is also confident things will go better.
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“You go back and you see that game that we just went through with Justin as starter, I thought Justin did a good job in many ways,” Nagy said. “Just keeping composed in that environment. There’s things that I’m not gonna get into in front of everybody as to why. Even as we’ve had more and more conversations, not just with coaches but players, too, it’s good to hear some of the feedback that you get. I think some of that will help, regardless of who the starter is. But to say, ‘Hey, for Justin, he had that game,’ he’s gonna have a lot of different games in his career. That one was a rough one, and I put that on me. That’s on me for why that went that way. I gotta learn from that. And we gotta learn from that. I think we have some answers, which is good.
“There's some things that, again, that we and I have learned by going through this process that we can help him and us out with different things.”